SEX CRIMINALS: It Came, It Saw, It Conquered

March 13, 2014

Hit comic book series collected in first trade paperback

It was welcomed into the world at a release party held at a sex club, where the writer had his nipple pierced on stage and the artist wore a Garfield suit. It was banned by Apple. Its first issue was reprinted six times (and counting!). It was Time’s best comic book of the year. Not bad for a little comic book about two people who can stop time when they have sex and turn to a life of crime. SEX CRIMINALS by Matt Fraction (SATELLITE SAM, Hawkeye) and Chip Zdarsky (Prison Funnies) is the title everyone has been talking about, and with its first trade paperback collection, One Weird Trick, due out in April, its audience is set to grow… and grow… and grow.

Suzie was all alone in what she calls “the quiet” until she met Jon, who has a decidedly less poetic name for the place where time freezes when they have sex. It’s all fun and games and rearranging the stock in the local porn shop until Suzie and Jon realize they can use their power for good — and start robbing banks.

Widely hailed for its sweet emotional core wrapped up in naughty hijinx and Zdarsky’s candy-colored art, SEX CRIMINALS isn’t just about sex. It’s about love, too. And sex. And robbing banks. And also about those mysterious figures who seem to be on to Suzie’s and Jon’s little coital trick.

SEX CRIMINALS VOLUME ONE will be in comic book stores on April 16 and in bookstores on April 29. It’s specially priced at $9.99, making it easy for new readers to jump onboard the hottest title of the year.

“Fraction’s been having a very good year — his many other projects include the sleeper-hit superhero series Hawkeye — but this R-rated romp (about a bank-robbing couple whose orgasms can stop time) is his best work yet. It’s a precision-tuned screwball comedy on its surface, and that surface is gorgeous, thanks to Zdarsky’s ace sense of design and inventive color technique. But it’s also genuinely insightful about the ways sexuality shapes people, and it doubles as a love letter to analog media —one that happens to have been banned by the iTunes store.”
– Douglas Wolk, Time

“A sex comedy with a splash of crime thriller, the title is a fascinating examination of the pleasures and pitfalls of intimate relationships, using the central fantastic conceit as a metaphor for the way sex distances people but also, under the right circumstances, brings them together.”
– Oliver Sava, A.V. Club

“...there are some moments that are incredibly deep and moments that are deeply funny, and the art in this book is absolutely at least as multi-layered and interesting as the writing…. Buy it. Read it. Love it.”
– Jaydot Sloane, The Mary Sue

“...funny and imaginative, with a strong emotional core, and characters who, despite their fantastic power, are relatable, even lovable….”
– John Parker, Comics Alliance

“There is nothing mean in the narrative of this book; no one – not even the “dirty girls at school” – is really denigrated or played as a stereotype…. The sexual politics and experiences ring absolutely true, right down to the tone of the first date between Suzie and Jon. None of their flirtiness, their attraction to each other, or their experience of the shared bond of their special power seems forced or stilted. These two would have been together even if they didn’t have a super-power, and they’re both enormously likeable, very real characters.”
– Ian Dawe, Sequart